Mail Online: “Test ‘reveals Facebook, Twitter and Google snoop on emails‘: Study of net giants spurs new privacy concerns. Facebook, Twitter and Google have been caught snooping on messages sent across their networks, new research claims, prompting campaigners to express concerns over privacy. The findings emerged from an experiment conducted following revelations by US security contractor Edward Snowden about government snooping on internet accounts.”

CBS Los Angeles: “The Glendale Unified School District has hired a Hermosa Beach company to monitor public social media posts made by its students to find out when teens are in trouble or causing it. Superintendent Richard Sheehan said Geo Listening is analyzing the posts of 13,000 students at eight Glendale middle and high schools.”

Wall St. Journal: “An entrenched surveillance state will change and distort the balance that allows free government to function successfully. Broad and intrusive surveillance will, definitively, put government in charge. But a republic only works . . . if public officials know that they—and the government itself—answer to the citizens. It doesn’t work, and is distorted, if the citizens must answer to the government. And that will happen more and more if the government knows—and you know—that the government has something, or some things, on you. ‘The bad thing is you no longer have the one thing we’re supposed to have as Americans living in a self-governing republic,’ . . . . ‘The people we elect are not your bosses, they are responsible to us.’ They must answer to us. But if they increasingly control our privacy, ‘suddenly they’re in charge if they know what you’re thinking‘.”

Law.com: “I long have believed that the best predictor of whether the U.S. Supreme Court finds a violation of the Fourth Amendment is whether the justices could imagine it happening to them. For example, the Supreme Court upheld drug-testing requirements in every case until it considered a Georgia law that required that high-level government officials be subjected to it. The two Fourth Amendment decisions this term, U.S. v. Jones and Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of Burlington County, powerfully illustrate that the justices only seem to care if it could happen to them.”

Thehill.com: “The case of a Marine who is facing discharge for posting disparaging comments about President Obama on Facebook has renewed a debate about free speech rights for members of the military.” For more about the latest controversy in free speech issues, the entire article is here.

ABA Journal: Citing “a distressing increase in reports of employers or others seeking to gain inappropriate access to people’s Facebook profiles,” Facebook’s chief privacy officer warned in a Friday post on the social network’s website that the company could “initiate legal action” against employers who do so.

The comment by Erin Egan suggested that information obtained in this manner could put employers at risk of a discrimination suit, reports Reuters.

Her comment follows news last week that lawmakers in at least two states, Illinois and Maryland, are considering possible legislation to prohibit employers from pressuring job applicants to provide their Facebook passwords. Lawmakers in California and Massachusetts also are mulling such legislation, the Associated Press reports.